WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
The mention of Irving, Cooper, and Bryant as representatives of New
York in the early nineteenth century is likely to mislead students
into thinking of them as literary associates. As a matter of fact they
seem not to have had any more contact than any other three educated
residents of the city. They were not unsociable men, but each went his
own social way. Until his period of controversy Cooper was leading
member of a literary club of which he had been the founder. Irving,
without going to the pains of organizing a group, was the natural
center of one which delighted in his company and emulated his ways of
thinking and writing. Bryant, instead of being drawn after either of
these older men, stepped into journalism, becoming a friend of the
great editors and the political leaders. Irving was the only one of the
three who was born and bred in town. Cooper and Bryant were not sons of
New York; they were among the first of its long list of eminent adopted
children.
Bryant (1794-1878) was born at Cummington, Massachusetts. His descent
can be traced to the earliest Plymouth families, and, on his mother's
side, to Priscilla Alden. His father was a much-loved country
doctor, the third of the family in recent generations to follow
this budding profession. He was a man of dignities in his town, a
state representative and senator, and a welcome friend of the Boston
book-lovers. His services were so freely given, however, that he had
little money to spend on his boy's education. This was carried on,
according to a common custom, under charge of clergymen, though not
the least important teaching came direct from the father's guidance
of his reading and criticism of his writing. Bryant's talents began
to show promise while he was still a boy, for he read eagerly, and in
his early 'teens wrote a number of "pieces" which were more or less
widely circulated in print. One of these, "The Embargo," a political
satire addressed to President Jefferson, ran to two editions and
roused so much doubt as to its authorship that his father's friends
soberly certified to it as the work of a boy of thirteen. In these
years Bryant made Alexander Pope his adored model, and for so young an
imitator he succeeded remarkably well. A little later he fell under the
influence of a group of minor Englishmen who have rather wickedly been
nicknamed the "Graveyard Poets" because of the persistency with which
they versified on death, the grave, and the after-life. "Thanatopsis,"
written before he was eighteen, was a reflection of and a response to
certain lines of Kirke White, who had deeply stirred his imagination.
Once again it was hard to persuade the literary world that young
Bryant was the actual author. "Thanatopsis" and the "Inscription for
the Entrance to a Wood" were published in the _North American Review_
without signature, according to the usual custom. The editors had
requested contributions from the elder Bryant, and he had found these
verses unfinished at home and had sent them on after copying them in
his own handwriting. The more famous poem so impressed the editors
that, far from believing it the work of an American boy, Richard H.
Dana, on hearing it read aloud, said to his colleague, "Ah, Phillips,
you have been imposed upon; no one on this side the Atlantic is capable
of writing such verses." In the meantime Bryant had been admitted at
fifteen to the sophomore class at Williams College, had withdrawn at
the end of a year intending to enter Yale the next autumn, had been
unable to carry out the plan through lack of funds, and had studied law
and been admitted to the bar. While still in doubt as to his choice
of profession he had written the "Lines to a Waterfowl," which were
later published in the _North American_, following the acceptance
of "Thanatopsis." He became a lawyer not through any love of the
profession but because it seemed a reasonable way to earn a living in a
period when one could not hope for support from his pen. He practiced
for nine years, never with any real enthusiasm, describing himself in
the midst of these years as
forced to drudge for the dregs of men,
And scrawl strange words with the barbarous pen,
And mingle among the jostling crowd,
Where the sons of strife are subtle and loud.
His discontent was increased by the applause which came with his
magazine poems and by the compliment of an invitation to deliver the
Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard in 1821. Finally, in 1825, he went down
to New York in the hope of making a success of a new periodical there.
In spite of his associate editorship _The New York Review and Athenæum
Magazine_ was as shortlived as scores of others. It was a bad time
in America for such a venture. The country was flooded with English
publications and American pirated editions of English works. The public
was not educated to the idea of magazines, nor the publishers to the
methods of financing them. They were unattractive in form and as heavy
in contents as the labored name of Bryant's ill-fated experiment. After
the collapse he returned for a short time to the practice of law, but
in 1826 he accepted the assistant editorship of the New York _Evening
Post_, three years later became editor, and continued with it until
his death in 1878. He was the first nineteenth-century man of letters
to enter the field of American journalism, and he played a highly
distinguished part in its history.
When Bryant became editor in chief of the New York _Evening Post_ he
was thirty-five years old. He had written about one third of the
poetry saved in the collected editions and about one half of the
better-known poems on which his reputation rests. This much is worth
considering by itself, because it has a character of its own and is
quite different from the output of the latter fifty years. In the first
place it was consciously religious in tone. Bryant came from Puritan
ancestry. He was brought up to believe in a stern God who had doomed
all mankind to eternal destruction and who ruled them relentlessly,
sometimes in sorrow but more often in anger. To the Puritans life on
earth was a prelude to eternity, and eternity was to be spent possibly
in bliss, but probably in torment. They were truly a people "whose
minds had derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation
of superior beings and eternal interests." His mind and imagination
were therefore wide open to the influence of Kirke White and the
other "Graveyard Poets." "Thanatopsis," or "a glimpse of death," was
composed under the eye of God as Bryant knew him. In setting down "When
thoughts of the last bitter hour come like a blight over thy spirit,"
he was not indulging in any far-fetched fancy; he was alluding to what
the minister brought home to him in two sermons every Sunday and to
the unfailing subject of discussion at the mid-week prayer meeting.
And when he wrote of approaching the grave "sustained and soothed by
an unfaltering trust," he was writing of a trust which needed to be
especially strong to face the thought of possible damnation.
In a broad sense all true poetry is religious, for it deals with truths
that lie beneath life and leads to higher thinking and better living,
but the religion of the youthful Bryant was specialized to a single
creed. The point is strikingly illustrated by the "Hymn to Death." The
first four fifths of this poem were written when he was twenty-five
years old, a meditation based on Puritan theology. All men die, he
said, even those one loves; but death is really God's instrument
to punish the wicked. Oppressors, idolaters, atheists, perjurers,
revelers, slanderers, the sons of violence and fraud are struck down.
Thus, from the first of time, hast thou been found
On virtue's side; the wicked, but for thee,
Had been too strong for the good; the great of earth
Had crushed the weak for ever.
Then, with the poem left at this stage, Bryant's father died while
still in the height of his powers and as the result of exposure in
meeting his duties as a country doctor. In the face of this calamity
the young poet's verses seemed to him a bitter mockery:
Shuddering I look
On what is written, yet I blot not out
The desultory numbers; let them stand,
The record of an idle revery.
This leads to the second characteristic of Bryant's earlier verse--more
often than not it was self-conscious and self-applied. He wrote to "The
Yellow Violet" and devoted five stanzas to it, but ended with three
more of self-analysis. The stanzas "To a Waterfowl" have a general and
beautiful application, but they were pointed in his mind by the thought
that he needed aid to "lead my steps aright" in the choice of his
life's vocation. Even the modest autumn flower, the "Fringed Gentian,"
reminded him of the autumn of his own life and the hope that he might
do as the flower, and look to heaven when the hour of death drew near.
This was the voice of youth which takes life as a personal matter and
assumes, out of sheer inexperience, that to his concrete wants "the
converging objects of the universe perpetually flow." Maturity makes
the wise man lift his eyes unto the hills whence cometh his help,
instead of continually brooding on his own hopes and fears. But this
habit of self-examination was natural not only to the young Puritan,
vaguely dissatisfied with the barren existence of a country lawyer;
it was closely akin to the sentimentalism of the age (see pp. 125
and 148). Bryant was like many of the late eighteenth-century poets,
dramatists, and novelists in his belief that quickness of emotion
was admirable in itself and that the tenderer emotions were marks of
refinement. After he had settled in the city he looked back with a
glance of approval to the days when the springs of feeling were filled
to the brim.
I cannot forget with what fervid devotion
I worshipped the visions of verse and of fame;
Each gaze at the glories of earth, sky, and ocean,
To my kindled emotions was wind over flame.
And deep were my musings in life's early blossom,
Mid the twilight of mountain-groves wandering long;
How thrilled my young veins, and how throbbed my full bosom,
When o'er me descended the spirit of song.
There is a slight touch of self-commendation in his continual
references to his thrills and awes and adorations and in the
"pleasurable melancholy," as Poe called it, with which he enjoyed life,
but we shall see that life in the city changed this for something more
positive.
Before turning away from this period, however, the student should take
heed of its poetic form. The remarkable thing about "Thanatopsis" was
not that Bryant should have entertained the thoughts it contains or
that he should have aspired to write them, but that he expressed them
in verses that were so beautiful and so different from anything ever
written before in America. It was their form at which Dana exclaimed
in his much-quoted remark to Phillips in the _North American Review_
office. When Bryant was a boy our native writers were, all but Freneau,
in the habit of imitating the English poets and essayists who had set
the style a full hundred years before. The young American who felt a
drawing to literature saturated himself in the writings of Addison,
Pope, Goldsmith, Johnson, and their followers (see pp. 70, 93, 116,
etc.). The verses of these men were neat, clean-cut, and orderly, and
filed down their pages like regiments of soldiers on dress parade.
They went along in rimed pairs, with a place to draw breath near the
middle of each line, a slight pause at the end of the first, and a
full stop at the end of the second. As a fashion, to be sure, it was
no more natural than the high, powdered headdresses and hoop skirts
which prevailed with the ladies at the same time, but it was a courtly
literary convention, and it could be acquired by any writer who was
patient and painstaking. In 1785 the best that John Trumbull could hope
for America was that it might produce copyists of these Englishmen,
and he expressed his hope in the usual set style--like a boy scout in
uniform dreaming of the day when he and his fellows may develop into
Leonard Woodses and Pershings (see p. 70). And Joseph Rodman Drake,
writing in one of the years when "Thanatopsis" was lying unpublished in
Dr. Bryant's desk, put his desire into an even more complex measure, a
modification of the Spenserian stanza (see p. 136).
Bryant, it will be remembered, made his first poetic flights in the
style of Pope, and he did well enough to be apparently on the highroad
of old-fashioned imitation. Then suddenly, while still a boy, he lifted
himself out of the rut of rime and began writing a free, fluent "blank
verse." It is the same five-stressed measure which Pope used,--the
measure of Shakespeare too, "If _mus_ic _be_ the _food_ of _love_, play
_on_"--but it is without rime, and the pauses come where the sense
demands instead of where the versification dictates. In the passages
just cited from Trumbull and Drake there is only one line where the
sense runs on without a slight pause,--the sense is forced to conform
to the rhythm; but in "Thanatopsis," although the rhythm is quite
regular, the pauses occur at all sorts of places, and seldom at the
line-ends. As Bryant set down the first seven and four-fifth lines, for
example, they read:
To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware;
but broken into groups, as one would read them, they fall:
To him who in the love of Nature
Holds communion with her visible forms,
She speaks a various language;
For his gayer hours she has a voice of gladness,
And a smile and eloquence of beauty,
And she glides into his darker musings,
With a mild and healing sympathy,
That steals away their sharpness, ere he is aware.
This was nothing new in poetry. Shakespeare had written his plays
almost entirely in this way, and Milton all of "Paradise Lost" and
"Paradise Regained," and the later English poets, most notably
Wordsworth, had just returned to it; but in America it was as
unfamiliar as the "free verse" which is puzzling a good many readers
to-day partly because it is printed in units of meaning instead of
units of measure. No wonder that Dana was surprised, "on this side the
Atlantic."
When Bryant went down into the crowded activity of New York City the
general tone of his work began to change. The things that he was doing
interested him as the practice of law never had done. The editorship
of the _Evening Post_ made him not merely a news vender but a molder
of public thought, and his entrance into the world of opinion gave him
more of an interest in life itself and less in his own emotions. Very
soon he wrote the "Hymn of the City" to record his discovery that God
lived in the town as well as in the country and that he was the God of
life quite as much as the God of death.
Thy Spirit is around,
Quickening the restless mass that sweeps along;
And this eternal sound--
Voices and footfalls of the numberless throng--
Like the resounding sea,
Or like the rainy tempest, speaks of Thee.
Then in "The Battle Field" (1837) and "The Antiquity of Freedom"
(1842) he moved on to what was a new thought in his verse. He was
still interested in beauty, whether it were the beauty of nature or
the beauty of holiness; but as a man who had plunged into the thick of
things he became for the first time wide-awake to the idea that as the
world grows older it grows wiser and that the well-rounded life cannot
be content simply to contemplate the beauties of June, for it must also
have some part in the struggle for justice. He had grown into nothing
less than a new idea of God. As a young Puritan he had felt Him to be
a power outside, who managed things. He had been content to pray, "Thy
will be done on earth as it is in heaven," and then he had turned his
back on earth and meditated about heaven. But now he aspired to do with
heaven what Addison had attempted to do with "philosophy," and bring
it down from the clouds into the hearts of men. When he wrote, in "The
Battle Field," "Truth crushed to earth shall rise again," he meant,
as the rest of the poem shows, not the old truth of centuries but the
unfamiliar truth which the new age must set on its throne.
There is perhaps no more striking illustration of the adoption of
so-called new truth than in the world's attitude toward the holding of
property in human life. Up to the time of Bryant's birth slaveholding
had been practiced in all the United States, by the Puritans of New
England as well as by the Cavaliers of the South. During the colonial
days in both regions the Bible had been accepted as final authority.
What it counseled and what it did not prohibit was right, and what
it condemned was wrong; and, judged on these grounds, slavery was
apparently sanctioned in the Bible. In spite of this, many leaders,
both North and South, protested against the practice before 1800. As
time went on, largely on account of the climate and the nature of the
industries, slavery waned in the North and thrived in the South. Then
in New England the great agitation arose; but still, in Massachusetts
as well as in Virginia, the men whose bank accounts were involved
defended human bondage on Scriptural grounds, protesting violently
against
creeds that dare to teach
What Christ and Paul refrained to preach.
Yet in the end the principle for which the Revolution was fought was
reaffirmed in behalf of the slaves who were serving the sons of the
Revolution.
Bryant became painfully conscious of the many issues to be fought out
in the cause of liberty, and in "The Antiquity of Freedom" he wrote of
the eternal vigilance and the eternal conflict needed to maintain it.
Oh! not yet
May'st thou unbrace thy corslet, nor lay by
Thy sword; nor yet, O Freedom! close thy lids
In slumber; for thine enemy never sleeps,
And thou must watch and combat till the day
Of the new earth and heaven.
That combat is still on; the right of the subject--including woman--to
a voice in the government, the right of the laborer to a fair return
on his work, and the right of the smaller nation to undisturbed
independence are among the uppermost problems that occupy the mind of
the world to-day.
Like many of his thoughtful countrymen Bryant founded his loyalty to
America on the hope that in this new land the seed of new truth would
fall on fertile soil. In "Earth," composed when he was in Italy, he
wrote:
O thou,
Who sittest far beyond the Atlantic deep,
Among the sources of thy glorious streams,
My native Land of Groves! a newer page
In the great record of the world is thine;
Shall it be fairer? Fear, and friendly Hope,
And Envy, watch the issue, while the lines
By which thou shalt be judged, are written down.
The number and bulk of his poems dedicated to America are not so great
as those by Freneau or Whittier and Lowell or Timrod and Lanier,
but his smaller group are as distinguished and as representative
as an equal number by any of the others except, possibly, Lowell.
In "O Mother of a Mighty Race" he alluded again to the envy and
unfriendliness of the older nations, which disturbed him as it did
Irving and Cooper. In the face of it he tried, with less success than
Irving, to keep his own temper, taking comfort in the thought that
the downtrodden and oppressed of Europe could find shelter here and a
chance to live. As a journalist he was a strong champion of Abraham
Lincoln long before the conservative East had given him unreserved
support; and when the Civil War came on he sounded "Our Country's Call"
and encouraged all within sound of his voice in "the grim resolve to
guard it well." During the war he wrote from time to time verses that
were full of devotion to the right and quite free from the note of hate
that poisons most war poetry; and at the end he mourned the death of
Lincoln no less fervently than he rejoiced at "The Death of Slavery."
Aside from these poems and others of their kind, which make the
connection between Bryant the editor and Bryant the poet, he continued
to write on his old themes--nature and the individual life. There
was no complete reversal of attitude; some of the later poems were
reminders of some of the earlier ones. Yet a real change came after
he had mixed with the world. At first he was inclined to lament the
loss of the old life, seeming to forget how irksome it had been when
he was in the midst of it. In such personal verses as "I cannot forget
with what fervid devotion" and "I broke the spell that held me long"
he was indulging in the luxury of mild self-pity. "In my younger days
I had lots of time, but no money and few friends. Now I have friends
and an income, but alas, I have no time." This was but a temporary
mood, however. It is quite clear from his later poems that he enjoyed
life more in town than in country. This is proven by the fact that
nature did not continue to suggest mournful thoughts. "The Planting of
the Apple Tree" is serenely recorded in "quaint old rhymes." Instead
of saying, as in his earlier manner: "We plant this apple tree, but
we plant it only for a few short years. Then it will die, like all
mankind. Perhaps I may be buried beneath its shade," he said: "Come,
let us plant it. It will blossom and bear fruit which will be eaten in
cottage and palace, here and abroad. And when it is old, perhaps its
aged branches will throw thin shadows on a better world than this is
now. Who knows?" The stanzas on "Robert of Lincoln" are not merely free
from sadness; they are positively jolly.
In the last years of his long career--he lived to be eighty-four--he
seems at first glance to have gone back to his youthful sadness;
but this is not really the case, for thoughts which are premature
or affected in youth are natural to old age. At eighty-two, in "A
Lifetime" and "The Flood of Years" he actually looked back over many
bereavements and forward but a very short way to the life after death.
The two poems taken together are an old man's farewell to the world.
Like the poem with which he won his first fame, they present another
glimpse of death, but this time it is a fair prospect of
A present in whose reign no grief shall gnaw
The Heart, and never shall a tender tie
Be broken.
When Bryant came to his seventieth birthday there was a notable
celebration at the Century Club in New York City. At that time three
poems were read by three of his fellow-poets--Holmes, Lowell, and
Whittier. What they said throws a great deal of light on Bryant's part
in American life and literature. Holmes sang his praises as a poet of
nature, a journalist of high ideals, a writer of solemn and majestic
verse whose later works fulfilled the promise of his first great poem.
Lowell went a step farther in paying his tribute to Bryant as a poet
of faith and freedom and as a citizen who gave life and courage to the
nation during the crisis of the Civil War. In this respect the author
of "The Battle Field" was quite as much of a pioneer as in his poems
about birds and flowers. He was far ahead of most of his countrymen
in his feeling for America as a nation among nations--not merely in
the slightly indignant mood of "O Mother of a Mighty Race," but better
in his feeling that new occasions bring new duties. Finally, Whittier
revered Bryant as a man. With all admiration for his art,
His life is now his noblest strain,
His manhood better than his verse!
In his later years Bryant was one of the best citizens of New York. His
striking presence on the streets, with his white hair and beard and his
fine vigor, made poetry real to the crowds who were inclined to think
of it as something impersonal that existed only in books. On account
of his powers as a public speaker and his place in literature he was
often called on to deliver memorial addresses, and was affectionately
named "the old man eloquent." His orations on Cooper and Irving were
among the first of these. His last was in 1878, at the unveiling of a
statue to the Italian patriot Mazzini. As he was returning into his
home he fell, receiving injuries from which he died shortly after.
It was fitting that his last words should have been in praise of a
champion of freedom and that he should have died with the echoes of his
countrymen's applause still ringing in his ears.
BOOK LIST
=_Individual Author_=
WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. The Life and Works of. Parke Godwin, editor. 6
vols. Vols. I and II, Biography, 1883; Vols. III and IV, Poetical
Works, 1883; Vols. V and VI, Prose Writings, 1884-1889. Best
single-volume edition is The Household, 1909, and The Roslyn,
1910. His poems appeared originally as follows: The Embargo, 1808;
Poems, 1821, 1832, 1834, 1836, 1839, 1840; The Fountain and Other
Poems, 1842; The White-Footed Deer and Other Poems, 1844; Poems,
1847, 1848, 1849, 1850, 1854, 1855, 1856, 1857. A Forest Hymn
[1860]; In the Woods, 1863; Thirty Poems, 1864; Hymns [1864];
Voices of Nature, 1865; The Song of the Sower, 1871; The Story of
the Fountain, 1872; The Little People of the Snow, 1873; Among
the Trees [1874]; The Flood of Years, 1878; Unpublished Poems of
Bryant and Thoreau, 1907.
=Bibliography=
STURGES, H. C. Prefixed to the Roslyn edition of Bryant and
also published separately. Also Cambridge History of American
Literature, Vol. I, pp. 517-521.
=Biography and Criticism=
The standard life is by Parke Godwin. Vols. I and II of the Life
and Works in 6 vols.
BIGELOW, J. William Cullen Bryant. 1890.
BRADLEY, W. A. William Cullen Bryant (_E. M. L. Series_). 1905.
COLLINS, CHURTON. Poets and Poetry of America.
CURTIS, G. W. The Life, Character, and Writings of William
Cullen Bryant. 1879.
LEONARD, W. E. Cambridge History of American Literature, Vol. I,
Bk. II, in chap. v.
PALMER, G. H. Atlas Essays.
POE, E. A. William Cullen Bryant. Complete Works. Vol. VIII.
1902.
STEDMAN, E. C. Genius and Other Essays. 1911.
STEDMAN, E. C. Poets of America. 1885.
TAYLOR, B. Critical Essays and Literary Notes. 1880.
VAN DOREN, CARL. Growth of Thanatopsis. _Nation_, Vol. CI, p.
432.
WILKINSON, W. C. A Free Lance in the Field of Life and Letters.
1874.
WILSON, J. G. Bryant and his Friends. 1886.
WOODBERRY, G. E. America in Literature. 1903.
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read the early poems of Bryant with reference to the prevalence of
death in them and particularly to the unexpected appearance of this
idea.
Read them again with reference to the sentimentalism in them.
Read "A Forest Hymn" and the "Hymn to Death" for a comparison of the
blank verse with that in "Thanatopsis."
Read "The Battle Field" and Wordsworth's sonnet "Written above
Westminster Abbey" for the different but sympathetic developments of
the same idea.
Compare Bryant's "Robert of Lincoln" and "The Planting of the Apple
Tree" with Freneau's "The Wild Honeysuckle" and "To a Caty-did."
Read Bryant's "Song of the Sower," Lanier's "Corn," and Timrod's "The
Cotton Boll" for evident points of likeness and difference.
Note in detail the relation between Bryant's journalistic career and
the turn of his mind in the poetry of the journalistic period.
Bryant wrote no journalistic poetry in the sense in which Freneau did,
or Whittier, or Lowell. For an explanation see his verses on "The
Poet."